Norris McWhirter

12:02AM BST 21 Apr 2004

Norris McWhirter, who died while playing tennis on Monday aged 78, was best known as the co-founder, with his identical twin brother, Ross, of the Guinness Book of Records, the best-selling work of non-fiction after the Bible; more than 75 million copies sold in 37 languages by the time Norris McWhirter's involvement ended in 1996.

Yet there was far more to him than this annual: McWhirter was an international athlete, a sports journalist and an accomplished broadcaster who covered four Olympics; he also became a household name to a generation through Roy Castle's television series The Record Breakers.

Furthermore, McWhirter chaired the family electronics business for almost three decades and founded the Redwood Press, which was printing one title out of every nine published in Britain by the time the Gieves group took it over in 1972.

Above all, McWhirter was a trenchant and provocative campaigner for the liberty of the individual against officialdom and the abuse of trade union power.

Initially he was, in this matter, a junior partner to his brother. His and Ross's political legacy is the Freedom Association, which Norris McWhirter founded with Viscount de l'Isle as the National Association for Freedom during the dark and ungovernable 1970s and which made an important contribution to the successes of Margaret Thatcher's government.

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Naff (the acronym was in those days not an unfortunate one) campaigned not only against abuses of power at home, but for the rights of Soviet dissidents and of the peoples of Europe against Brussels.

McWhirter also had a litigious streak, though it was not as strong as his brother's. From 1954 (when he forced Holborn council to register him as an elector) to 1993 (when he attempted to have Douglas Hurd prosecuted for treason for signing the Maastricht Treaty), he was seldom out of the courts.

He also took as far as the Court of Appeal his claim that the Heath government acted illegally in signing the Treaty of Accession to the European Community. Yet he was not an anti-European in principle, campaigning at length for aspects of the Convention on Human Rights to be incorporated into British law.

One of McWhirter's perennial targets was subliminal advertising. In 1970 he demanded that the Director of Public Prosecutions investigate the Labour Party for repeatedly flashing the message "Labour tomorrow" for 0.04 of a second during an election broadcast. In 1985 he unsuccessfully sued the Independent Broadcasting Authority after Spitting Image briefly transmitted his face attached to the body of a naked woman.

At the time of the Millennium, he bought, with a business partner, a hilltop on Pitt Island, off New Zealand's eastern coast, which he calculated would be the first point on land to see the sunrise on January 1 2000, and set up an auction of the worldwide television rights. Thorough as ever with his research, he commissioned a scientific paper to assess the claims of rival locations before concluding that his was the one that counted.

Bursting with energy, fervent in his views and meticulous in his recording of facts, McWhirter was alert in front of the cameras and was in private the most engaging of men; it would have been easy for him to become a bore, but that he never was.

If there was a faraway look in his eye, it stemmed from the loss of his brother - "not a bereavement, an amputation", as he once put it - who was gunned down by the IRA on his doorstep in Enfield in 1975 after he had offered a £50,000 reward for the capture of terrorist bombers.

The Naff was in the process of being formed and, five days later, Norris McWhirter took his brother's place as its deputy chairman with the moving words: "I am resigned to be a target. I take the view that I have had a good life and that I owe something to Ross's memory." Norris perpetuated his memory through the Ross McWhirter Foundation to encourage responsible citizenship.

Norris Dewar McWhirter was born at Winchmore Hill, north London, on August 12 1925, the middle son (and the elder of twins) of William McWhirter, managing director of Associated Newspapers and the Northcliffe Newspaper Group, and the former Margaret Williamson. He was a grandson of William McWhirter, inventor of the voltmeter and ammeter.

Educated at Marlborough, in the Second World War he joined the Navy, serving first in the Atlantic in the 2nd Escort Group and later on minesweepers in the Pacific. On demobilisation in 1946, he went up to Trinity College, Oxford, with his twin, graduating in International Relations and Economics and then taking an MA in Law.

But it was as an athlete that he shone. He won his Blue in the 100 yards (his best time being under 10 seconds), and went on to represent Scotland over three seasons and to compete for Great Britain against Norway in 1951, winning the 100 and 200 metres. He also played rugby for Middlesex.

With his journalistic background and his contacts as an athlete, it was almost inevitable that he should become a sports writer. In 1951 he began 16 years as athletics correspondent of The Observer, also working for The Star until 1960 (Ross was its rugby and tennis correspondent). He also wrote a book on athletics, Get to Your Marks, and edited Athletics World for four years from 1952.

McWhirter was also a BBC television athletics commentator, covering every Olympics from Rome to Munich, and for three years from 1970 served on the Sports Council.

In Rome he was involved in a farcical incident when - there being no electronic link - he was told to wave a white handkerchief when the British walker Don Thompson was entering the stadium, so that the BBC could interrupt its scheduled programming to broadcast his victory. McWhirter waved, David Coleman began his commentary - and 15 minutes later Thompson entered the stadium; McWhirter had cut his hand and used the handkerchief as a bandage.

His determination to work for the company he had founded with his brother, rather than be in thrall to an employer, brought him into conflict with elements in the National Union of Journalists, to which he belonged. An attack on "non-journalist" sports writers by the rumbustious J L Manning led the twins to sue in 1954 for libel and slander. They were awarded £300 damages.

This was a golden age for British athletics, culminating in the breaking of the fourminute mile barrier by Roger Bannister. All the talk was of records, and Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of Guinness, saw the commercial opportunity. He asked Chris Chataway, who had run second to Bannister and was working for the company, to recommend someone who could write a book about records; Chataway suggested the McWhirters. Guinness Superlatives was founded, and in 1955 the Guinness Book of Records appeared, written in just 16 weeks.

It was an instant best-seller and has remained so, maintaining its appeal by mixing straight facts ("the largest kidney reported in medical literature was one of 13lb 4oz") with the bizarre (the name of the acrobat who performed a quadruple back somersault to a chair at the New York Hippodrome in 1915, and the artiste who caught him). McWhirter edited 32 editions of the Guinness Book until 1986, when he became its advisory editor. He and his brother produced similar works, including the Dunlop Book of Facts and the Guinness Book of Answers.

A Conservative since his days at Oxford, McWhirter's first foray into politics was, characteristically, a freelance action leading with his chin.

Over Easter 1958, he drove his brother to Aldermaston, where anti-nuclear demonstrators were due to end their annual march. From the roof of their Mercedes, a megaphone told the marchers: "Each one of you is increasing the risk of nuclear war. You are playing Khruschev's game. Moscow is making use of you." Enraged pacifists attacked the car, causing £150 worth of damage before they were hauled off by stewards.

After the Conservatives' by-election humiliation at Orpington in 1962, the constituency association sought a "strong candidate" for the General Election, and chose McWhirter. Among his most enthusiastic local backers there were Denis Thatcher and his wife Margaret, the recently elected MP for Finchley.

McWhirter halved Eric Lubbock's majority in 1964 and again in 1966, helped that time by the fact that with Ross campaigning for him he could appear to cover twice as much ground. Yet it was to take one more heave, with another candidate, to oust "Orpington Man".

McWhirter did not involve himself in politics again on a regular basis until Naff was launched. While an act of terrorism spurred its formation, Naff turned its fire against the social policies of the Callaghan government, supporting parents attempting to keep grammar schools and challenging postal workers' blacking of mail from South Africa and the Grunwick photographic laboratory.

Mrs Thatcher speedily recognised his contribution to individual liberties with a CBE in the 1980 New Year's Honours List. That year he spearheaded a legal challenge against the International Olympic Committee's insistence on staging the Games in Moscow despite the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He also nudged a hesitant government towards reform of trade union law by taking to the European Court several cases of workers sacked for refusing to join a union; they lost, but Mrs Thatcher spurred a reluctant James Prior and his successors to legislate.

On sporting issues, he tried to have officials of the International Amateur Athletics Federation charged with blackmail for trying to stop Zola Budd competing for Britain in the 1988 Olympics because she had recently run in her native South Africa. He managed to secure a summons for blackmail, though not a conviction, when the International Cricket Conference sought to ban from Test cricket players who had toured South Africa; however, his limited success panicked the ICC into abandoning retrospective sanctions.

In 1999 McWhirter was invited by Virgin to produce Norris McWhirter's Millennium Book of Records. In the same year he set up, with Lord Harris of High Cross, a legal fund to help Neil Hamilton, after the former MP had lost his libel action against Mohammed Fayed.

In 1957 Norris McWhirter married Carole Eckert, who died in 1987; they had a son and a daughter. In 1990 he married, secondly, Tessa von Weichardt, née Pocock.